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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Routine operations
On Friday I went to a talk by Steven Ley titled Going with the Flow: Enabling Technologies for Molecule Makers. His group at Cambridge have done a lot of impressive work on flow chemistry over many years, both developing the … Continue reading
Details matter
Blog Syn is a new chemistry blog where chemists post their attempts to reproduce reactions from the literature. Each post starts with the following disclaimer: The following experiments do not constitute rigorous peer review, but rather illustrate typical yields obtained … Continue reading
Tools and technologies for researchers
The Library at Imperial run a course called Blogs, Twitter, wikis and other web-based tools. They asked me (and also Jon Tennant) to give a quick talk to the attendees yesterday on the things I use to do my work. … Continue reading
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Microwave heating: still nothing special
For many years there has been debate over whether there is a specific microwave effect on chemical reactions or if it’s just a thermal effect. A couple of years ago I took lecture course on microwave and ultrasound chemistry. The … Continue reading
Defending chemists’ outreach at #solo12jobs (updated)
At SpotOn London I went to the “Juggling jobs. Balancing a research career with SciComm—is it a policy issue?” session. You can read a description on the session page. The hashtag was #solo12jobs on Twitter. During the session Athene Donald, … Continue reading
Chem Coach Carnival
Here’s my very late contribution to See Arr Oh’s Chem Coach Carnival. The hashtag is #ChemCoach on Twitter. Your current job. I’m a PhD student at the Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial College London. I make metal nanoparticles of … Continue reading
Conference talks: generally a bit rubbish?
Athene Donald recently wrote about what you don’t see at academic conferences. Academics may go to conferences in exotic places but they only see the inside of conference centres, hotels, airports and restaurants. In the last year I’ve only been … Continue reading
Open Access: Going for Gold?
Tonight the Science Communication Forum at Imperial College held a debate called Open Access: Going for Gold? with Stephen Curry (Imperial) and Mark Thorley (NERC, RCUK). The debate was chaired by Richard Van Noorden (Nature News). Update 2 (28th September): … Continue reading
The way-it-should-be-ness
The BBC have published an audio slideshow called Chair Champions on Charles and Ray Eames, designers best known for their furniture. The Eames Lounge Chair is probably their most famous work. I like well-designed things. Not in the sense that … Continue reading
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Forget the scotch tape: how to make loads of graphene
Earlier this year I was writing a review about transparent conducting materials for organic electronic applications. As part of it, I wrote a fair bit about graphene. One of the key problems is that it’s difficult to scale the desirable … Continue reading
